[Sm]all things considered by Riina Vuorikari

Posting about everyday life of a professional in the field of "e-learning" and "technology enhanced learning" in Europe. Topics range from practice and policy issues to research - and to other small things to be considered.

Paper Submission Due: May 12,2015Notification of Acceptance: August 4,2015======================================================================Organized by Asia-Pacific Society for Computers in Education (APSCE)http://www.apsce.net/Hosted by: Zhejiang University of Technology, Collaborative and Innovative Center for Educational Technology, China

ICCE 2015 is a premier annual international forum for researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and people in the industry in the Asia-Pacific region to connect with international research communities for the worldwide dissemination and sharing of ideas for research in the field of Computers in Education.

The conference program will comprise keynotes, invited talks, paper presentations and poster sessions, workshops, tutorials, interactive events and Doctoral Student Consortia. All the accepted papers in the main conference, workshops and Doctoral Student Consortium will be published in proceedings which will be indexed by Elsevier Bibliographic Databases (e.g., Scopus, EngineeringVillage and others).

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

As other years before, I'm glad to be part of the Programme Committee for the International Conference on Web-based Learning! This year it will be organised by Hong Kong Web Society. The call for papers below.

ICWL is an annual international conference on web-based learning
organised by Hong Kong Web Society. The first ICWL was held in Hong Kong
in 2002. Since then, it has been held in Australia (2003), China
(2004), Hong Kong (2005), Malaysia (2006), United Kingdom (2007), China
(2008), Germany (2009), China (2010), Hong Kong (2011), Romania (2012),
Taiwan (2013) and Estonia (2014).

ICWL 2015 will be the 14th
ICWL conference and will be held in Guangzhou, China. The conference
program will feature keynote addresses, workshops, panels, posters,
demos and industry track, in addition to presentations of refereed
papers that have been selected by the international program committee. A
special attention will be paid on collaboration and exchange of
knowledge between our local communities. We especially invite joint
contributions from colleagues coming from different continents. We plan a
special issue for collaborative papers expressing the spirit of ICWL,
to be a truly international conference. In addition we will provide an
Asian-Australian-European Research Exchange Forum for presentations from
funded research projects.

Papers for submission should be formatted according to the Springer
LNCS Authors Guidelines and have maximum 10 pages. Since the review
process will be double-blind, the submitted manuscript should not
contain the authors’ names, affiliations, or any information that may
disclose the authors’ identity. All papers should be submitted in PDF
format.

All accepted papers presented at the conference will be
published as a volume in Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science
(LNCS).

Guangzhou (also romanized as: Canton) is the capital and largest city
of Guangdong province in South China. Located on the Pearl River, about
120 km (75 mi) north-northwest of Hong Kong and north-northeast of
Macau, Guangzhou is a key national transportation hub and trading port.
One of the five National Central Cities, it holds sub-provincial
administrative status. Guangzhou is the third largest Chinese city and
the largest city in South Central China. As of the 2010 census, the
city's administrative area had a population of 12.78 million. Some
estimates place the population of the entire Pearl River Delta Mega City
built up area as high as 40 million, with an area of about 20,000
square kilometres (7,700 sq mi). In 2012 Guangzhou was identified as a
Beta+ World City by the global city index produced by the GaWC, the
Globalization and
World Cities Research Network.

About Sun Yat-sen University

Sun Yat-sen University was founded in 1924 by Dr. Sun Yat-sen (also
called Sun Zhongshan), a great democratic revolutionary leader of the
20th century. The University is located in Guangdong Province, an area
neighboring Hong Kong and Macao, which is at the forefront of China's
reform and opening up.

Being one of the leading universities in
China, Sun Yat-sen University is a comprehensive multi-disciplinary
university, including the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences,
technical sciences, medical sciences, pharmacology, and management
sciences. It has about 82,384 students studying on four campuses in
Guangzhou and Zhuhai. Benefiting from its location near Hong Kong and
Macao and the regional advantage of
opening and economic
development, the university has become an important base for training
high-level talents, scientific research, providing services to society
and inheriting cultural traditions. The University has also successfully
built international cooperation and exchange relationships with many
top universities in the world. According to the Times Higher Education
World University Ranking for 2010-2011, Sun Yat-sen
University was
ranked in the top 200 in the world. At present, Sun Yat-sen University
covers a total area of 5.972 square kilometers and has 4 campuses:
Guangzhou South Campus, Guangzhou North Campus, Guangzhou East Campus,
and Zhuhai Campus.

Monday, December 01, 2014

This year again, I'm pleased to be part of the Program Committee of the
15th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies
(ICALT2015)! The conference will be held in Hualien, Taiwan from 6-9 July 2015.

The call for paper is out with a deadline of January 20th, 2015 for the submission of papers (Full Paper, Short Paper, Poster).

Emerging technologies keep transforming not only the ways people learn
but what they learn as well. Access to learning is nowadays moving
beyond defined pathways and discrete courses. It rather integrates
formal and informal learning experiences throughout life. Learning is
structured around flexible curricula that accommodate needs of diverse
student audiences, and offer access to courses, content, and resources
through a variety of platforms, devices, and contexts. This change of
the way people access learning poses quandaries for educational
organisations, researchers, practitioners and policy makers, especially
with regards to the development of advanced technologies that
accommodate the needs of a new generation of learners; the choice of
appropriate technologies; and the application of learning technologies
in emerging learning contexts.

Wednesday, July 02, 2014

Khan Academy is a really intriguing platform. I remember the first time when hearing of it, it was in 2009, Khan himself presented it in the BigIdeasFest in California. He had just received a big grand from Bill Gates to develop it further. I had a hard time imagining what was so cool about it. After all, it was a very classical way of "frontal teaching" where a teacher walks you through a problem. Well, this was in 2009, life before the hype on MOOCs, flipped classroom hype, etc... :)

So after lots of talk about Khan Academy, today, I was glad to find this piece of research on teachers' use of Khan Academy: How Are Teachers and Students Using Khan Academy? (comment: Funnily enough, the starting point of Khan Academy was not to be used as part of formal educational context, but rather as a "catch up tool" when the teacher wasn't really doing his/her job as ought to.)

An interesting finding:

While Khan Academy videos are often associated with
the flipped classroom model in which teachers assign instructional videos to be watched at home, none of the teachers in this study used that model. And though some educators have used Khan Academy videos as a
launching point for project-based learning models, none of the teachers
in this study reported using that model.

So instead of an innovative new way of using the resources, teachers often resorted back to their usual classroom organisation, namely to using Khan Academy resources as part of a rotational model (some use it, while others use pen&paper and a third group receives face2face lesson), for remediation purposes or as part of self-paced studies.

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

One of my favourite conferences on e-learning is the International Conference on Web-based Learning. This year it takes place in Tallinn, Estonia on 13-16 August 2014. Also one of my favourite Nordic capitals! And I'm also glad to be able to serve as part of the Programme Committee again :)

Authors are invited to submit original papers reporting on research
results or novel applications in technology-enhanced learning. Submissions
will be handled through EasyChair:
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=icwl2014.

Papers for submission should be formatted according to the Springer LNCS
Authors Guidelines
(http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0) and have
maximum 10 pages. Since the review process will be double-blind, the
submitted manuscript should not contain the authors' names, affiliations,
or any information that may disclose the authors' identity. All papers
should be submitted in PDF format.

All accepted papers presented at the conference will be published as a
volume in Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS).

Saturday, November 23, 2013

I especially like the part starting at 9.3 min. where he talks about how cities are network:

"cities are network
and the most important network of cities is you. Cities are just a
physical manifestation of your interactions, our interactions, and the
clustering and grouping of individuals"

However, a word of warning: read the comments and the critical discussion!

"Physicist Geoffrey West has found that simple, mathematical laws
govern the properties of cities -- that wealth, crime rate, walking
speed and many other aspects of a city can be deduced from a single
number: the city's population. In this mind-bending talk from TEDGlobal
he shows how it works and how similar laws hold for organisms and
corporations.

Physicist Geoffrey West believes that complex systems from
organisms to cities are in many ways governed by simple laws -- laws
that can be discovered and analyzed."